Off the Agenda: Conversations for Building Church Leaders

As a show of solidarity with my seven-year-old daughter, I recently reread the classic Little House on the Prairie books and Anne of Green Gables. One phenomenon I noticed this time around (probably because I’m in the habit of thinking about church leadership) was that the books’ good, churchgoing characters didn’t have to choose between churches of various sizes and stripes. They simply attended the church in town and enjoyed (or put up with) the teachings of Reverend So-and-So every Sunday.

My, how things have changed. Along with the constant and dizzying array of choices we face every day, we have the luxury of choosing the church we like best. I know some small towns and villages in our country still have only one church. But in most of those cases, people live within driving distance of other communities and might choose to drive to one of them to attend another church. And the situation is very different where I live—in some areas I can find a church on every block. And on a recent trip to the area around Fort Worth, Texas, I thought I saw at least two churches on every block.

Continue reading "Highlighting Our Differences"...

Amy Simpson is passionate about serving the church and its people through leadership, communication, and resources. She currently serves as executive director for the Leadership Media Group at Christianity Today International.

Her background includes a 13-year career in Christian publishing and a lifetime of church ministry. She is the author of numerous resources for Christian ministry, including Diving Deep: Experiencing Jesus Through Spiritual Disciplines.

Amy holds an English degree from Trinity International University and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Colorado-Denver. She is married to Trevor and is mom to two fantastic kids.

For other considerations, read Scot's article on the Leadership website, or dive into the post below.

A church’s ability to minister to people hinges on its confidence in the Word of God. A low-confidence church can’t teach or preach or serve with any real sense of expectation. It can’t profess assurance that God speaks or that listening for his voice is worthwhile. A high-confidence church lives in another reality: a realm in which God speaks and acts, calls and sends.

The divide here isn’t a clear-cut, liberal-conservative issue. It isn’t an issue that can be dealt with primarily on an institutional level. Confidence in the Word of God is intensely personal. The question is this: do you believe that God speaks?

How we answer that question determines more about our ministry than almost any other. If the answer is yes, that we are high-confidence believers, then we can ask God to bend, shape, and teach us. If the answer is no, then our low-confidence answer should prompt a question: why is this God worth serving.

Continue reading "Listening to God's Word"...

Chris Blumhofer is associate editor for BuildingChurchLeaders.com, where he began working in February 2006. In his role, Chris coordinates and edits many of the articles and training downloads that reach Building Church Leaders customers.

Chris attends College Church in Wheaton, Illinois, where he has served as a small-group leader, a short-term missions trip leader, a Sunday school teacher, and as a ministry intern. He earned a bachelor’s degree in biblical and theological studies from Wheaton College.

Chris collects books, and he has a growing collection of theologians whose last names start with B (Bonhoeffer, Barth, Bornkamm). He loves tennis and cooking. He is trying to love running. He lives with the perpetual hope that the Bears will win the next Super Bowl and the Cubs will win the next World Series.

Chris and his wife, Stephanie, live in Wheaton, Illinois.

Landscapers know the best way to prevent weeds is not to attack them individually. Uprooting stubborn dandelions or chickweed one by one will improve appearances temporarily, but within days, the troublesome plants will be back. The best way to handle weeds is a thick, healthy lawn, which keeps them from springing up in the first place.

Likewise pastors, who are charged to "see to it … that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many" (Heb. 12:15), find that the best way to prevent dragon blight, or at least minimize its damage, is to concentrate on developing a healthy church.

Taking opportunities to build a close, cohesive church will produce better results than the shrewdest political maneuvers after problems sprout. Defusing potential problems before they arise is far better than troubleshooting later on.

What are the keys to dragon-proofing a church? Obviously no technique is 100-percent sure, but there are several principles pastors have found helpful in building church health.

Continue reading "The Best Defense for Conflict is a Good Offense"...

Marshall Shelley is editorial vice-president of Christianity Today International, and editor in chief of the Leadership Media Group, which includes Leadership journal, PreachingToday.com, BuildingChurchLeaders.com, FaithVisuals.com, BuildingSmallGroups.com, and ChristianBibleStudies.com.

Marshall is author of several books, including The Consumer Church: Can Evangelicals Win the World Without Losing Their Soul, (InterVarsity Press), which he co-authored with his father, church historian Bruce Shelley, and The Leadership Secrets of Billy Graham, (Zondervan, 2006), which he co-authored with Harold Myra.

Her friends on the team felt hurt by the decision. The farewell party, despite the fancy cake, was visibly strained.

Meanwhile, I was reading Good to Great (HarperBusiness, 2001), in which Jim Collins explains the traits of leaders who transform good organizations into great ones. "We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy," he writes. "We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seat—and then they figured out where to drive it."

Makes eminent sense: If you get the right people, in the right seats, then you and they will be able to figure out where to take the organization. Once you've heard, "First, get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus," it seems self-evident.

Before we dutifully apply this principle as Christian leaders, however, we'd be wise to consider a few things.

Continue reading "Arranging the Passengers on the Church Leadership Bus"...

Kevin A. Miller is editor-at-large of Leadership journal and executive vice president at Christianity Today International. Kevin writes for Leadership journal and PreachingToday.com, and he is a featured speaker for Preaching Today Audio. Kevin is also the author of several books, including Surviving Information Overload (Zondervan).

I know where you live: in a nation ruled by the god of Business, where those who do not have the power to buy are shunted aside. The old and the very young are ignored. The few (who do not make up a critical mass, a niche market, a group worthy of attention) are dismissed.

Instead of a business, you rural churches have been a faithful family. You have refused to be professionalized; you have rejected the model of corporate effectiveness. Like me, you have chosen to be inefficient. You have lavished love and energy on the old and sick, on the isolated, on the very young. You have patiently waited decades for fruit. You ministers who spend your lives in the service of a congregation of 30, you teachers who pour out your souls for a Bible class of 5: you have understood what it means to be children of the Father and brothers and sisters of the Son.

You have also rejected those who claim to act in my name: those church-planting experts who advise that my people "target" only densely populated areas so that the largest number of people can be efficiently herded into the kingdom; the denominational leaders who have seen you as a useful training ground for inexperienced pastors who will soon move on to "better pulpits" in more worthy (and populated) places. You have endured this, and remained strong, and understood the truth: that size and efficiency are important only in the economy of hell.

Continue reading "To Those Who Lead the Rural Church"...

In mid-January, the Wall Street Journal published an article about church discipline, choosing for its focus a case in which a 71-year-old woman was expelled from her congregation. The article made almost no use of concepts that are central to church discipline—redemption, unity, and discipleship. Almost immediately, a small niche of the blog world erupted at the overwhelmingly negative portrayal of discipline. A few secular blogs picked up on the article, too, and they used it to bolster cynicism.

Off the Agenda decided to take the opportunity to address and to expand upon the core issue brought up in the article—how leaders and congregants can survive the pitfalls of conflict. In the following article, Ken Sande, president of Peacemaker Ministries and a member of Building Church Leaders’ Ask the Experts panel, explains several steps that leaders can take to avoid destructive conflict. This article first appeared on Peacemaker’s website:

Every year hundreds of churches and ministries are thrown into turmoil when someone criticizes or raises serious questions about the conduct of a pastor or ministry executive. All too many of these situations end in resignation, dishonor, or division—usually because those who are responsible for addressing the allegations commit one of two major errors.

Continue reading "Holding Leaders Accountable"...

Ken Sande is president of Peacemaker Ministries and author of The Peacemaker, which has been translated into ten languages. He is passionate about bringing the life-changing power of God’s peacemaking principles into the lives of Christians and their churches. His early experience in engineering and law fueled his desire to dedicate his life to biblical peacemaking, resulting in his decision 25 years ago to found Peacemaker Ministries.

Pastor Ned finally realized that changing the worship style and moving the worship times at his church were the wrong problems for him to be working on. This realization came only after he had paid a terrible price personally in terms of the conflict generated by his new initiatives. He had endured months of criticism from church members who resisted the changes before they happened as he nurtured the hope that the new worship would draw many new faces into the church, making all the pain worthwhile. Trouble is, it didn't happen. Now, four months into the new schedule and services, he was looking at the same faces—actually, fewer of those faces.

Ned finally came to grips with the real issue: the congregation's lack of mission. The right question involved helping the church gain God's heart for people, especially those who have yet to hear the gospel of God's redemptive love. Absent this conviction, the church members just viewed the worship and schedule changes as a loss for them.

This beleaguered pastor is not alone. All over North America churches and church leaders are busy addressing the wrong questions. Answering them not only won't address the critical issues facing them, it will, in fact, compound the wider church's dilemma and hasten its slide into spiritual obsolescence in the emerging culture.

Continue reading "Reggie McNeal: Ask the Right Questions"...

Reggie enjoys helping people, leaders, and Christian organizations pursue more intentional lives. He currently serves as the Missional Leadership Specialist for Leadership Network of Dallas, Texas.

Reggie has contributed to numerous denominational publications and church leadership journals, including Leadership journal and Net Results. His books include Revolution in Leadership (Abingdon Press, 1998), A Work of Heart: Understanding How God Shapes Spiritual Leaders (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2000), The Present Future (Jossey-Bass, 2003), Practicing Greatness: 7 Disciplines of Extraordinary Spiritual Leaders (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2006), and Get A Life! (Broadman & Holman, 2007).

If you’re not familiar with that book, it’s basically a call for the church—both universal and individual—to return to the missional/movement ethos that drove its rapid growth and impact during the Early Church, and that is currently doing the same through the house-church movement in China.

In the book, Hirsch writes about six principles of missional movements that he identified throughout the course of his research. One of them really piqued my interest: embracing the idea of communitas instead of what we traditionally call community. If you’re not familiar with the term, communitas are basically a type of community that develops out of a shared ordeal or challenge—they’re what turn friends into comrades. Think of a house church that meets in secret to avoid persecution, for example.

I was curious how that principle could possibly be applied to middle-class America, so I asked him. Click below to hear what he has to say--to me, it sounds like pretty good advice:

Sam O’Neal is managing editor of the Discipleship Team at Christianity Today International, where he works primarily with small-groups resources. He is a contributor to Leadership journal, Ignite Your Faith, and Christianity Today.